At Snowflake Software we make commercially licensed software that we sell to enterprise customers who need to move data around in XML. The company started in 2001, so we now have 13 years worth of legacy in our code base which has been put together by a growing development team. A couple of years ago we introduced Spring and Hibernate into our technology stack but since then we have felt like we were fighting against the frameworks so, whilst we were getting benefits from the new technologies, we were paying a high price in terms of effort.

In this talk we’ll share our learnings from building, maintaining and re-architecting a large Spring and Hibernate legacy application. We’ll share how we approach architectural decisions collaboratively and objectively, avoiding some of the biggest challenges that typically hit older-style applications.

Thanks to our sponsors

Getting Objective about Improving Architecture with Spring and the Life Preserver

Eddie Curtis is CTO at Snowflake Software which he co-founded in 2001 along with Ian Painter (Snowflake's MD). Ian and Eddie both previously worked at Ordnance Survey and founded the company to fill the gap in the market for tools to work with the then emerging Geography Markup Language family of standards. As CTO Eddie is responsible for the health of Snowflake's code-base and, despite the growth of the company, still gets to work at the code-face part of the time.

At Snowflake Software we make commercially licensed software that we sell to enterprise customers who need to move data around in XML. The company started in 2001, so we now have 13 years worth of legacy in our code base which has been put together by a growing development team. A couple of years ago we introduced Spring and Hibernate into our technology stack but since then we have felt like we were fighting against the frameworks so, whilst we were getting benefits from the new technologies, we were paying a high price in terms of effort.

In this talk we’ll share our learnings from building, maintaining and re-architecting a large Spring and Hibernate legacy application. We’ll share how we approach architectural decisions collaboratively and objectively, avoiding some of the biggest challenges that typically hit older-style applications.

Thanks to our sponsors

Getting Objective about Improving Architecture with Spring and the Life Preserver

Eddie Curtis is CTO at Snowflake Software which he co-founded in 2001 along with Ian Painter (Snowflake's MD). Ian and Eddie both previously worked at Ordnance Survey and founded the company to fill the gap in the market for tools to work with the then emerging Geography Markup Language family of standards. As CTO Eddie is responsible for the health of Snowflake's code-base and, despite the growth of the company, still gets to work at the code-face part of the time.